Quality Lead (Agentic Development)

As the Quality Lead within the Castle project team, you'll be at the heart of a unique and exciting venture to build a new financial services platform using an agentic manufacturing line approach. You'll be responsible for defining the quality requirements that feed into our cells, setting the quality standards and best practice the cells work to, and ensuring that delivered work, whether agent-led or human-led, meets those requirements. Operating like an independent start-up, within an established organisation, you'll be completely at home with iterative engineering and modern agentic delivery., * Defining and maintaining the overall quality and test strategy, ensuring that quality is engineered in earlier rather than verified later

• Setting the quality standards and best practice that the agentic cells work to, and defining the quality requirements that feed into each cell
• Supervising AI agents producing test coverage, regression, and defect detection, continuously improving that capability and intervening hands-on where needed
• Identifying and driving opportunities for agent-led testing, continuous testing, and quality improvements
• Implementing tools, frameworks, or prompts that uplift quality capability across cells
• Owning technical acceptance criteria across the platform
• Collaborating closely with Technical Leads, Product Owners, and cell members to ensure quality practices support reliable, secure, and scalable delivery
• Ensuring consistency of quality standards and practices across cells through code review feedback, tooling usage, and compliance with quality frameworks
• Tracking and reducing testing-related technical debt, including flakey tests, outdated frameworks, and missing automation backlog items
• Maintaining test data availability and environment readiness to keep delivery cycles moving

We're looking for an experienced quality leader, with a working knowledge of agentic development, to join a new 'start-up' division within N Brown., * Driven by boundless curiosity and experimentally minded, always starting with 'why?'.

• Tenacious and persistent, willing to go above and beyond to deliver great outcomes.
• Focused and decisive, able to ruthlessly prioritise to stay on track.
• Energised by collaboration and a champion of radical candour.
• Believes as much in having fun as working hard., * Test strategy, planning, and management
• Automated functional testing eg Jest, Cypress, Playwright
• Performance testing tools eg JMeter
• Test data management
• Knowledge and experience of target platforms eg microservices, APIs
• JavaScript and TypeScript
• JavaScript runtime and package management eg Node, NPM
• Source control eg Git, GitLab
• Monitoring tools eg Grafana, Kibana
• Agentic-driven delivery, including agent-led test authoring and prompt and context engineering for test design and defect triage
• Agile development methodologies
• Application lifecycle management eg Jira, Confluence
• ISTQB Advanced Level Test Manager certification (desirable)

• 24 days holiday (+ 8 bank holidays)
• Annual bonus scheme
• Enhanced maternity and adoption leave
• Company pension with up to 8% N Brown contribution
• Mental Health support both internally and externally, including access to our wellbeing champions and counselling services
• A range of financial wellbeing support
• Stream - a financial wellbeing tool that helps you track your pay, access earnings early and manage your money with confidence
• Colleague discount across all N Brown brands
• Onsite café with subsidised rates and local restaurant discounts!
• Life Assurance and Private Medical Insurance
• Paid volunteer time - all our colleagues can take a full day paid to volunteer for a charity of their choice

N Brown - who we are and why work for us?

N Brown is a leading UK digital retail platform for clothing, footwear, home and technology, headquartered in Manchester and employing over 1,000 people nationwide. Through our strategic retail brands JD Williams, Jacamo and Simply Be and our unique payments offering, we exist to champion inclusivity and serve the underserved. Our customers are our passion, and we take great pride in delivering products that ensure they can look and feel amazing, without compromising on choice, value and accessibility. We're committed to building a diverse workforce and creating an inclusive environment that values equality for all. Our vision is that by 'By championing inclusion, N Brown will become the UK's most loved and trusted consumer platform, shaping the future of financial empowerment and personal expression'. 'Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging are, therefore, at the heart of our culture. In May 2024 we were delighted to be named one of The Sunday Times Best Places to Work 2024. We work hard to create a happy and inclusive culture for everyone and we're so proud to have made this list - as voted for by our very own colleagues! Ways of Working We offer hybrid working which varies across the business depending on the role you're in. Our Head Office is located in the Northern Quarter in Manchester City Centre. So if you are travelling by train, tram or bus we're perfectly located, plus we're surrounded by cool cafes, trendy bars and the best places to eat! Our working hours are 36.17 per week over 5 days. We believe AI will become a standard part of modern professional practice. We are therefore looking for individuals who are open to learning, testing, and responsibly adopting AI tools to improve efficiency, insight, and impact in their role.